Enlarge / The Interpol headquarters in France.
Ministry of Justice officials have long called for a kind of back door to allow legitimate surveillance and searches of encrypted communications. Recently, that push has been implemented internationally with Attorney General William Barr and his counterparts from the UK and Australia who openly advocate Facebook for postponing plans to use end-to-end encryption for all the company’s messaging tools.
The Ministry of Justice and the Federal Investigation Office are now trying to reach an even greater international consensus on banning end-to-end encryption through a draft resolution prepared by FBI officials for the 37th meeting of the International Criminal Police Organization. INTERPOL Specialists Group on Crimes against Children. The event took place from 12 to 15 November at the INTERPOL headquarters in Lyon, France.
A draft Ars Technica resolution states that INTERPOL would “strongly encourage technology service providers to allow legal access to encrypted data enabled or enabled by their systems” in the interest of the sexual exploitation of children. It is currently unclear whether Interpol will issue a statement.
The motion for a resolution then placed responsibility for the exploitation of children with the technology industry:
The current path to standard end-to-end encryption, without the possibility of legal access, offers no protection for the children of the world against sexual exploitation. Technology suppliers must act and design their services in a way that on the one hand protects the privacy of users and on the other hand offers user safety. Failure to access legal platforms on their platforms and products provides a safe haven for offenders who use them to sexually exploit children, and impedes our worldwide law enforcement efforts to protect children.
Conference participants told Ars that the resolution statement would be published this week. But in an email to Nicole Perlroth from the New York Times, a spokesperson for INTERPOL denied that the resolution was being considered:
Interpol told me that Reuter’s story is inaccurate:
Dear Mrs. Perlroth,
According to our statement, there are currently no plans for the INTERPOL Secretariat to issue a statement on coding.
Regards,
Press Officehttps: //t.co/EItFe0D3Je
– Nicole Perlroth (@nicoleperlroth) November 18, 2019
Ars has requested an comment from an FBI official and has not yet received a response.
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In a statement that is at odds with the consensus of cryptographers and other technical experts, the motion for a resolution stated that “technologists agree” that designing (allowing) legitimate access to data while maintaining customer privacy. can be implemented in a way that would improve privacy while maintaining strong cyber security. “In order to honor and enforce the standards for prohibiting the distribution of” child sexual abuse material “, the motion for a resolution states that providers must fully comply with court orders giving law enforcement authorities access to data relating to criminal investigations involving sexual exploitation of children. “
Facebook and other companies currently comply with legitimate requests for data under the terms of the CLOUD law – a law passed in 2018 that requires technology companies to provide data requested by a warrant or subpoena to law enforcement officers, wherever in the world they are stored . But the officials behind this draft resolution claim that such compliance cannot be achieved while end-to-end coding of communication is permitted.
As Barr and his countrymen noted in their October letter to Facebook, Facebook’s ability to perform analysis and manage user communication content was 90 percent of child pornography reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2018 By providing end-to-end encryption, officials claim, Facebook would essentially allow future distribution of child pornography to “get dark” and prevent law enforcement officials from collecting evidence against suspects.
There is little evidence today that encryption has until now been a major obstacle to intercepting communications by law enforcement officers. According to statistics from the Administration Office of the US Courts, out of a total of 2,937 telephone taps in 2018, only 146 were coded – of which only 58 could not be decoded.
Facebook has already implemented end-to-end encryption in products such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger (although Messenger does not offer end-to-end encryption as standard). In response to Barr’s letter, Facebook officials responded:
End-to-end encryption already protects the messages of more than a billion people every day. It is increasingly used in the communications industry and in many other important sectors of the economy. We are strongly opposed to attempts by the government to build back doors, because they would undermine the privacy and security of people everywhere.
As Ars has repeatedly reported, many cryptography and security experts agree with Facebook’s assessment. The security community has largely resisted the most urge for encryption back doors because any secret “golden key” to decrypt encrypted messages would be technically unfeasible – and could potentially be exploited by malicious third parties.
